At the Academy Awards early this year, No Other Land, a Palestinian-Israeli film, turned heads with its stinging portrayal of demolition and displacement in the West Bank, eventually landing the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
In the months that followed, almost all major international film festivals in the world have embraced new movies based on the war in Gaza, handing over top honours for their artistic achievements, strong narratives and historical rigour.
For a non-existent Palestinian film industry, the long list of new feature, documentary and hybrid movies produced in the past two years since the Israeli war in Gaza that claimed 70,400 lives has been a remarkable feat.
One of the first movies to come out of Gaza during this period, giving a glimpse of the level of destruction was From Ground Zero, which premiered at the Amman International Film Festival in Jordan in July last year.
From Ground Zero
An initiative of celebrated Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, whose works like Curfew (1994) and Arafat, My Brother (2005) helped bring stories of the struggle and suffering of Palestinians under occupation to the outside world, From Ground Zero featured 22 short films by filmmakers living in Gaza.
Co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and backed by Doha Film Institute and Royal Film Commission of Jordan, the 112-minute film told heartrending tales like that of a young man rescued thrice from under the debris in one day, a single parent recycling a bucket of scant water in kitchen, bathroom, laundry, toilet and even a flower pot, the death of a young couple only days after planning their wedding and names of their future children, and a young woman who lost her father and 17 members of their family in Israeli bombing writing a letter to an imaginary friend.
From Ground Zero, which was withdrawn from the Dharamshala International Film Festival last year, went on to become Palestine’s official entry for the Best International Feature at the 2025 Oscar Awards.
For the 2026 Oscar Awards, as many as three countries have submitted films based on the war in Gaza as their official entries for the Best International Feature prize. Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir is Palestine’s official entry to the 2026 Oscars while Jordan has submitted All That’s Left of You by Cherien Dabis and the Tunisian entry is The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania.
Palestine 36, All That’s Left of You and The Voice of Hind Rajab are strong favourites for a place on the shortlist for Best International Feature to be announced on December 16, with names of the final five nominees to follow on January 22 next year.
All three films have been the highlight of every major film festival in the Middle East and North Africa region with a majority Arab population this year, including the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco, and the Cairo International Film Festival in Egypt.
Voice of Victims
West Bank-born director Jacir’s new film, Palestine 36, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September this year, traces the roots of genocide in Palestine all the way back to the violence under British occupation in 1936. The film casts Palestinian acting legends Hiam Abbass, the star of television series Succession, and Saleh Bakri, the son of iconic actor Mohammad Bakri.
The trauma of three generations of a West Bank family is the subject of All That’s Left of You by Palestinian-origin filmmaker and Only Murders in the Building director Dabis. Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year, the film’s historical gaze emerges from the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians for the creation of Israel in 1948, and extends up to 2022, a year before the October 7 invasion of Israel by Hamas that killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
The Voice of Hind Rajab, which won the Silver Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival along with nearly a dozen of its collateral awards, was the closing film at the Cairo Film Festival and the opening film at the Doha Film Festival in Qatar, both in November.
Produced in a hybrid documentary-fiction format, The Voice of Hind Rajab reconstructs the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl along with six of her family members by Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza in January this year using original recording of the child’s cries for help in a phone call with emergency workers of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah, West Bank.
Reviving voices of the victims of the war in Gaza was the focus of another Palestinian film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which premiered in ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema), a prestigious parallel selection at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Gaza-based photojournalist Fatma Hassona, whose work on ground zero was the subject of the documentary by Iranian director Sepideh Farsi, was mysteriously killed in Israeli bombing soon after the selection of the film in Cannes.
An official selection at the Cannes Film Festival this year was Once Upon a Time in Gaza, an artistic journey by Gaza-born brothers Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser to go back to the centre of the conflict through Palestine’s first Western-style film. Paris-based Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s new work, Yes, a movie critical of the war in Gaza, was part of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes this year.
The Gaza war influenced Palestinian director and well-known contemporary artist Kamal Aljafari to dust off footage of his visit to Gaza two decades ago to locate a fellow prisoner during his own incarceration at the time of the first Intifada in 2011. The result was With Hasan in Gaza, a documentary that premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in August this year.
Urgency of Artists
“The Israeli genocide in Gaza has intensified a long-standing urgency among artists. What we’re seeing at festivals now isn’t a sudden wave of ‘topical’ films. It’s the result of years of work by filmmakers who have been documenting, questioning and resisting the systems that enabled this violence,” says Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti, who was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for his 2009 film Ajami, set in Jaffa, Israel.
“The artists are responding not only to the ongoing genocide but to decades of dispossession, dehumanisation and deliberate narrative erasure. The cinema emerging now is part of a broader cultural refusal to let this violence be normalised or forgotten,” explains Copti, whose new film in development, A Childhood, is built entirely from material that predates the year 2023, like mobile phone footage, CCTV recordings, eyewitness videos and children’s testimonies from the West Bank.
Like Copti, many other Palestinian directors are currently busy developing new film projects as a direct response to the war in Gaza. “Palestinian cinema is more than ever very vivid in the last two years,” says Hédi Zardi, head of the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops industry and talent development programme that selected several new Palestinian projects, like A Childhood, this year.
“I think the genocide is bringing the urge for Palestinian filmmakers to tell their stories,” adds Zardi. “They use the narrative as a metaphor for what the people are living. I admire the strength of their desire for storytelling.”
